No, translateZ just makes it a composited layer. Hardware comes much later in the pipeline and possibly in another process.
The content of the layer isn't hardware rendered. It's rendered by the CPU and uploaded to a texture. In WebKit and probably Blink there's a fast path for images, canvas and video so that they can be directly uploaded or (on some platforms like Mac) bound to a texture avoiding an upload copy.
Microsoft and (maybe) Mozilla have a "hardware rendering" path via Direct2D, but Chrome and WebKit don't, they have compositors which can use the graphics hardware to perform compositing, but not rendering.
The content of the layer isn't hardware rendered. It's rendered by the CPU and uploaded to a texture. In WebKit and probably Blink there's a fast path for images, canvas and video so that they can be directly uploaded or (on some platforms like Mac) bound to a texture avoiding an upload copy.
Microsoft and (maybe) Mozilla have a "hardware rendering" path via Direct2D, but Chrome and WebKit don't, they have compositors which can use the graphics hardware to perform compositing, but not rendering.